


Two visits to Earth

by Woozletania



Series: Rocket one-shot AUs [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Post-Movie: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-04-06 22:56:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14067390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Woozletania/pseuds/Woozletania
Summary: A youthful indiscretion comes back to haunt Rocket as he realizes it has dramatically impacted the lives of pretty much everyone on Earth.Note: This is another hypothetical AU and separate from my other stories like Sanctuary and Living With Rocket.





	Two visits to Earth

Two visits to Earth  
By Woozletania

"Terra, Terra, Terra," Rocket grumbled. He flicked one planet after another off the screen. Once in a while, rather than discarding the display, he flicked it off to a side screen. "All he even talks about. D'ast Terrain music, d'ast Terran people. You'd think he never left that rock."

"I am Groot," observed the three foot tall tree in the co-pilot's seat.

"I know," Rocket said. He flicked a fourth world onto the side screen. "That's why I got curious."

The little two-man fighter he'd patched together from spare parts on the Quadrant brought back fond memories of the battle over Xandar. That had been great fun. Dancing in midair, taking out necrocraft. Being appreciated for once for what he was: an awesomely skilled pilot and warrior. Nothing cheered Rocket up like a good firefight, and that was one of the best.

"I am Groot," said Groot, as he held up a glossy paper card. On it was an strangely familiar brown animal and a lot of alien text that resolved as he looked at it thanks to his translator implant. Procyon Lotor, it said at the top. North American Raccoon.

"I know already," Rocket grumped. "Why do you think we're going? I'm never gonna admit it to Pete but that does look like me. And it looks like...well, it was before I met you, bud."

Rocket had half a dozen worlds on the side screen now and with skilful pokes of a claw he shifted them around, looking for a familiar configuration. None of them were Terra but if he was right Centaurus was close to their target. It was halfway across the galaxy, but none of the individual jumps were too bad.

Rocket leaned back in the chair as he thought. The little animal on the card was familiar. Too familiar. Though he "saw" things as much by their smell and touch - his little hands were a hundred times as sensitive as a man's - as sight, his eyes were keen too.

He remembered things like the brown animal on the card, remembered the sight and smell and feel of them.

"It was right after I escaped from the lab," he said. "Blew the place up, took an aircar. Managed to get to the spaceport and stole a ship. I had to take a junker and its navcom was crap. I got away from the patrol ships but crashed on a low-tech planet. There were...things there."

It wasn't his proudest moment. Rocket was one of a kind, but the local animals that showed up as he repaired the ship were eerily like him. They couldn't talk, but they were curious and mostly friendly. The aggressive ones, some as large as himself, were no match for his cybernetically augmented strength. He didn't even have to shoot them, just chase them away. That left just the friendly ones. The very, very friendly ones.

Rocket shook his head. He was young and stupid and lonely back then. It was long before he met Groot. They were just animals. Even if it'd really been Terra he crashed on way back then, he was the only one who knew what happened there. And that's the way it would stay. He'd just started to get comfortable with the other Guardians and he didn't need a youthful indiscretion getting in the way.

"Yeah, I'm curious," he admitted. He took the controls and guided the little ship through a series of jumps. "I just wanna see if it really was Terra I crashed on."  


He remembered what they smelled like. The smell did something to him. Made him do things. He'd been there for what, a month or so, and how many of them did he meet? A hundred, two hundred? As soon as one group of them satisfied their curiosity about their strange furry visitor and left, more showed up. He'd chase away the aggressive ones, then...

"Another half hour, bud," he said. He didn't say the rest. Because if he'd really been on Terra, and the brown animal on the card really was the same thing he'd met on that world, then Pete was right. He really was a 'raccoon', or at least, his mother had been. His memories of her amounted to nothing more than warm fur and safety, as he'd been taken from her before his eyes even opened. He never found out what they did with her. All he knew was what they did to him.

Rocket shook his head again. No time to get maudlin, or angry. He was just curious, is all. If all went well he'd know by the end of the day whether his species came from Terra. He'd find out and move on, never admitting to Pete or the others what he'd found. 

"Centaurus," he said as they emerged from jump. A few taps of his claws brought up a system scan. Trinary system, two major stars and a red dwarf. Various worlds, including two in the liquid water zone, but not inhabited. There were the Kree nav beacons, just where the guide said they'd be. Kree had been interested in Terra for centuries. They'd even done some genetic tinkering on humans, just as the Celestials had long ago. 

The Kree had a research station and military presence here in Centaurus but packed up and left years back when their efforts to take advantage of the Celestial tinkering failed. They managed to create something called Inhumans but it hadn't worked out well for them at all. Something about a prophecy and a threat to their Supremor.

That wasn't why he was here. He acknowledged a computerized interrogation from a buoy and nodded as his displays updated. 

"That's what I figured," he said. "Terra isn't on galactic charts but there's a jump route plotted from here. And probably from other directions too." If he'd really jumped there it hadn't been from Centaurus.

"Last jump," he said, and smiled as they entered hyperspace. Sure, the trip was to satisfy his curiosity, but that didn't mean he couldn't profit. If nothing else he could pick up some Terran music for Pete and claim he got it from a junker, just like Pete got that "travel bed for anthropomorphics, size four" for him that was absolute a pet bed made on the planet they were about to visit.

Boom. Terra. They came out of jump and a blue and green world as pretty as any he'd seen loomed close ahead. Then an alarm shrilled and Rocket's eyes widened.  


"Look all all the traffic! Das't, this isn't supposed to be here!" There were at least a hundred ships of various sizes on routes between Terra and the two closest planets, both in the early stages of terraforming. More were making their way to and from the planet's moon and even more making runs out to the local asteroid belt. At least three orbital shipyards around the mother planet were building more.

"Hold on bud," Rocket growled as he brought the little fighter to a halt shy of the planet. There were massive weapon emplacements on the moon, planetary defense fortresses in Terra's desert regions, battle stations in orbit, sleek purpose-built warships among the freighters and mining ships. No one was shooting but whoever it was was definitely ready for a fight.

A chill ran down Rocket's spine as they were scanned. A dozen ships and stations were scanning them and he learned a lot from the signals. The main thing he learned was that he had no idea who was doing the scanning. These weren't Kree, or Skull, or Chitauri, or Badoon, or even Shi'ar. He quickly checked other known racial tech signatures as well. The Colonizers from Rigel? No. The...Kymellians? Asgard? Nope.

Several nearby ships were looking them over but no one armed weapons and Rocket took that as a good sign. There was enough firepower out there to reduce them to an expanding cloud of plasma a hundred times over.

"Okay, someone wants to talk," Rocket said. He'd monitored a thousand transmissions since they arrived but they were all encrypted. This one was in the clear. He tapped a control with a claw and turned to the screen.

"I am Groot!"

Rocket didn't say anything for a moment, just sat there with his mouth hanging open. The three furry figures on the screen were not so shy.  
"It is him!" The female turned toward the closer male. "The scans did not lie. It is he!"

The older male squinted at Rocket through the screen, his one cybernetic eye whirring. "It cannot be. It must be another fake, another attempt to take advantage of us."

"It is not," the younger male said. This one had a military-style uniform that clearly incorporated close fitting body armor, unlike the simple, if decorated harnesses his companions wore. "Genetic scans are absolute. It is he." He looked up from his datapad and gathered himself for a moment before speaking.  


"Welcome, honored progenitor."

For a moment Rocket stared blankly at the three raccoons on the screen. Behind them a humie worked, his dress and attitude showing that she was clearly subservient to the raccoons.

Even as he gawked his fingers flicked instinctively across the controls. They'd sent him a brief synopsis of their history and it popped up on his console.  


'Ten years ago,' it read. 'The Great Progenitor visited us from the stars and lay with the Mothers. He passed to his progeny his mind, his skill, and they on to their progeny. The first conflict with humans soon followed as we proved smarter and better with technology. The states of Missouri and Alabama were ceded to us after the Battle of Kansas City. Next came the Virginia Uprising...'

"This can't be right," Rocket said. The three raccoons on the screen were respectfully silent. "Even if they all got pregnant, there were only a few dozen. There are millions of them now. Hundreds of millions."

The display on his panel updated in response to his question. 'Numbers were small until the great geneticist Bent-Tail isolated the Progenitor's genes and built a virus that communicated them to all the other procyonids.'

"Aw, man." Rocket looked up from the pad. There were still humans down there, billions of them. But from his displays, the raccoons - his descendants - were firmly in charge of Terra and its solar system. His children managed to Uplift not just some of the native raccoons, but all of them, and somehow his own Uplifted intellect and skill with technology had passed to all of them. Rocket thought about how much damage he could do if left alone with technology, then multiplied that by hundreds, thousands of raccoons. 

It hadn't been completely one-sided, but with raccoon populations already established in many human cities the sudden Uplift gave them access to technology in great quantities. The humans never had a chance. They'd been conquered in less than two years. Some of them had sided with the raccoons, but it wouldn't have mattered in the end. Super intelligent, fast breeding, tech savvy raccoons simply overwhelmed them.

"You left parts from your repaired ship on Earth, honored progenitor," the female raccoon on the screen said. "It was enough for our smartest ones to take us into space. Please, dock at the indicated port. We have much to share with you."

Rocket watched a dozen ships form up as an honor guard. The airwaves were full of chatter and they'd politely provided him with a decryption key. Everyone, absolutely everyone was talking about him. They couldn't fake something on this scale. Not even the Skrull could. This was really happening.  


"Welcome, progenitor," said the older raccoon on the screen. "Welcome to the First Raccoon Dominion."

"Okaaaay," Rocket said under his breath. "Okay, bud, you listen real careful.". His skilled hands guided the little fighter into the port, where dozens of raccoons and a few humans anxiously awaited his arrival. Raccoons and humans ran up to connect refueling lines and docking tiedowns as cameras were set up to record what they must consider an historic moment. Rocket looked across at Groot.

"Quill. Must. Never. Know."


End file.
